Louis Agassiz
Creator of American Science
-
- $2.99
-
- $2.99
Publisher Description
“This book is not just about a man of science but also about a scientific culture in the making—warts and all.” —The New York Times Book Review
Charismatic and controversial Swiss immigrant Louis Agassiz took America by storm in the early nineteenth century, becoming a defining force in American science. Yet today, many don’t know the complex story behind this revolutionary figure.
At a young age, Agassiz—zoologist, glaciologist, and paleontologist—was invited to deliver a series of lectures in Boston, and he never left. An obsessive pioneer in field research, Agassiz enlisted the American public in a vast campaign to send him natural specimens, dead or alive, for his ingeniously conceived museum of comparative zoology. As an educator of enduring impact, he trained a generation of American scientists and science teachers, men and women alike—and entered into collaboration with his brilliant wife, Elizabeth, a science writer in her own right and first president of Radcliffe College. But there was a dark side to his reputation as well.
Biographer Christoph Irmscher reveals unflinching evidence of Agassiz’s racist impulses and shows how avidly Americans at the time looked to men of science to mediate race policy. He also explores Agassiz’s stubborn resistance to evolution, his battles with a student—renowned naturalist Henry James Clark—and how he became a source of endless bemusement for Charles Darwin and esteemed botanist Asa Gray. “A wonderful . . . biography,” both inspiring and cautionary, it is for anyone interested in the history of American ideas (The Christian Science Monitor).
“A model of what a talented and erudite literary scholar can do with a scientific subject.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Agassiz (1807 1873), a defining force in American science in the 19th century, was a complex man, as Irmscher demonstrates in this new biography: he was a brilliant scientist who rejected evolution, a man who valued friendship but abandoned his first wife. In Irmscher's hands, Agassiz's life and passions are embedded in the major intellectual ideas of his time, not only evolution but also the fight over abolition (he was an "incorrigible racist"). But Agassiz, from his position at Harvard, helped move the scientific enterprise toward reliance upon data and empirical observation. The methods he espoused remain important today even though his theories were outdated in his own time. Irmscher, an English professor at Indiana University (Longfellow Redux), sees Agassiz's life as a cautionary tale: Agassiz lost objectivity as he permitted his own opinions to overshadow the data he loved so much. His attacks on Darwin and on racial equality often ran counter to basic scientific observations and led to his increasing marginalization later in life. The relationship between Agassiz and his second wife, Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz, the first president of Radcliffe College, is also fascinating and illuminates the strength of one woman and the expanding opportunities for women in general in American society. Illus.
